The Song of Kahunsha

I've only been to India once. It was a three-week long vacation filled with visiting ziyarats (mausoleums where religious leaders are buried), eating chaat on the streets and haggling in bazaars in whatever city we were in that particular day.

Although there are many visible differences between India and Canada, the one I found most interesting and disturbing was the thousands of beggars on the street.

When I was in Mumbai, we would often have men, women and children knocking on our car window asking if we had spare change. To be honest, it was quite scary at times. Sometimes beggars would even slip their hands through a slightly rolled down window while we were stopped at a red light.

Unlike me, my savvy cousins in Mumbai were immune to being accosted by the poor. But I always wondered what it feels like to live on the streets. Are the poor aware of their social status? What does it feel like to not have enough to eat - or worse, not have an education? Do they have dreams like me?

Anosh Irani's new book, The Song of Kahunsha answers these questions and much more. The novel is set in the busy streets of Mumbai in the early '90s in the midst of religious violence. The reader sees the world through 10 year-old Chamdi's eyes.

As he ventures from the confines of his orphanage in search of his father, Chamdi meets siblings Sumdi and Guddi. In hopes that one day the exciting and unsympathetic city of Bombay will become Chamdi's fantasty city called Kahunsha, we see that the dreams of the poor are not so different from our own.

The Song of Kahunsha, a Canadian bestseller, was chosen by CBC Radio as 'Canada Reads' selection this year.